Its quite obvious that netbooks are becoming more and more popular as of late. Companies are continuing to release essentially the same products in slightly different form factors, and have been for a while. Given their fairly low prices and portability, it really is not surprise. But, the question has always remained: just how popular are netbooks? How many people actually have them?

According to a December 2008 study by PriceGrabber.com, ten percent of online consumers have netbooks. With the machines being out for just over a year, that is incredibly rapid growth. Of those owners, most also own desktops and laptops, making the netbook their third computer, presumably for the size and battery life of the units.

Breaking the study down, it shows that 19 percent of the laptop market is now dedicated to netbooks. 12 of PriceGrabber.com’s most popular laptops are netbooks, with five of those being Acer products, two from Lenovo, and one from each of HP, Dell, Asus, Samsung, and MSI. Taking market segments into it, most netbook owners are near middle-aged, with more than half of the owners being in the 35 to 54 age range (26 percent 35-44, and 27 percent 45-54).

The fact that netbooks are so widespread comes at no real surprise, though the fact that Acer holds the second most popular netbook on PriceGrabber.com is unexpected. The study asked the participants about the question of SSD-based netbooks, and only 11 percent said they would definitely buy a netbook with SSD, and 43 percent saying they would, but only when the price drops. Sure, SSD is quite expensive at the moment, but is there really a huge need for a ton of storage on netbooks? It would make a bit more sense if they were almost entirely cloud-based, with minimal storage for the OS and some important files for when Internet is unavailable.

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These kinds of surveys are distorted. Instead of 10% of users, this is more appropriately 10% of users that use PriceGrabber own netbooks. We all know that the type of traffic PriceGrabber gets is mainly from tech sites and others that have shopping portals through them. We could also call this 10% of techies that use PriceGrabber own netbooks.